If you're a budding cinephile, it can be difficult to know where to start or even to find a baseline. Cinema becomes more daunting every year as new films are released and old films are reappraised. With this in mind, the staff of Collider.com has collaborated on 100 movies we think every film fan needs to see. To be clear, this list is not an ending, but a beginning. It's meant to serve as a starting point. Just because a movie didn't make this list of 100, that doesn't mean it's "inessential." Rather, we …

Billy Wilder is one of our great film directors, an artist whose track record speaks for itself, a guy who somehow made multiple genre-defining-and-modifying masterpieces one after the other like some kind of incredible filmic assembly line. For any sincere fan or creator of cinema, Wilder's work is simply essential. Born in 1906 in the Austria-Hungarian Empire (what we now know as Poland), Wilder began his career in Berlin, working first as a journalist and then eventually as a screenwriter. The traumas of the Holocaust affected Wilder's family tragically — his mother, grandmother, and stepfather …

If you're a budding cinephile, it can be difficult to know where to start or even to find a baseline. Cinema becomes more daunting every year as new films are released and old films are reappraised. With this in mind, the staff of Collider.com has collaborated on 100 movies we think every film fan needs to see. To be clear, this list is not an ending, but a beginning. It's meant to serve as a starting point. Just because a movie didn't make this list of 100, that doesn't mean it's "inessential." Rather, we …